eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

May 2011

05/22/2011

The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins is a fine example of the “Sensation Novel” an off-shoot of the Gothic novel and quite popular in England in the 1860’s and 1870’s. The brief description sounds like this:

“Typically the sensation novel focused on shocking subject matter including adultery, theft, kidnapping, insanity, bigamy, forgery, seduction and murder. It distinguished itself from other contemporary genres, including the Gothic novel, by setting these themes in ordinary, familiar and often domestic settings, thereby undermining the common Victorian-era assumption that sensational events were something foreign and divorced from comfortable middle-class life.”

The Woman in White does not disappoint as it does indeed include all of the above appalling features. In many ways it leans far more in the direction of a modern crime series on TV (Chase, Lie to Me, etc.) than in the direction of a Jane Austen novel where the great shock might involve a broken engagement rather than a kidnapped victim of sexual abuse being drugged on laudanum and imprisoned in an asylum at the behest of a criminal mastermind who winds up murdered by his gang. “If the machinery of the Law,” says the primary narrator,

“could be depended on to fathom every case of suspicion, and to conduct every process of inquiry, with moderate assistance only from the lubricating influences of oil of gold, the events which fill these pages might have claimed their share of the public attention in a Court of Justice.

But the Law is still, in certain inevitable cases, the pre-engaged servant of the long purse; and the story is left to be told.”

In one of the early chapters, the story’s hero, art-teacher Walter Hartright (it is always helpful when authors name their good-guys with names that make them easy to identify as good guys) falls deeply in love with one of his pupils, Miss Laura Fairlee. I always enjoy the way that different authors describe this fundamental experience of young love born and then crushed. Here is how Wilkie Collins goes about it.

“. . . The days passed on, the weeks passed on, and the track of the golden autumn wound its bright way visibly through the green summer of the trees. Peaceful, fast-flowing, happy time! my story glides by you now as swiftly as you once glided by me. Of all the treasures of enjoyment that you poured so freely into my heart, how much is left me that has purpose and value enough to be written on this page? Nothing but the saddest of all confessions that a man can make -- the confession of his own folly.

The secret which that confession discloses should be told with little effort, for it has indirectly escaped me already. The poor weak words, which have failed to describe Miss Fairlie, have succeeded in betraying the sensations she awakened in me. It is so with us all. Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.

I loved her.

Ah! how well I know all the sadness and all the mockery that is contained in those three words. I can sigh over my mournful confession with the tenderest woman who reads it and pities me. I can laugh at it as bitterly as the hardest man who tosses it from him in contempt. I loved her! Feel for me, or despise me, I confess it with the same immovable resolution to own the truth.

. . . I should have remembered my position, and have put myself secretly on my guard. I did so, but not till it was too late. All the discretion, all the experience, which had availed me with other women, and secured me against other temptations, failed me with her. It had been my profession, for years past, to be in this close contact with young girls of all ages, and of all orders of beauty. I had accepted the position as part of my calling in life; I had trained myself to leave all the sympathies natural to my age in my employer's outer hall, as coolly as I left my umbrella there before I went upstairs. I had long since learnt to understand, composedly and as a matter of course, that my situation in life was considered a guarantee against any of my female pupils feeling more than the most ordinary interest in me, and that I was admitted among beautiful and captivating women much as a harmless domestic animal is admitted among them. This guardian experience I had gained early; this guardian experience had sternly and strictly guided me straight along my own poor narrow path, without once letting me stray aside, to the right hand or to the left. And now I and my trusty talisman were parted for the first time. Yes, my hardly- earned self-control was as completely lost to me as if I had never possessed it; lost to me, as it is lost every day to other men, in other critical situations, where women are concerned. I know, now, that I should have questioned myself from the first. I should have asked why any room in the house was better than home to me when she entered it, and barren as a desert when she went out again -- why I always noticed and remembered the little changes in her dress that I had noticed and remembered in no other woman's before -- why I saw her, heard her, and touched her (when we shook hands at night and morning) as I had never seen, heard, and touched any other woman in my life? I should have looked into my own heart, and found this new growth springing up there, and plucked it out while it was young. Why was this easiest, simplest work of self-culture always too much for me? The explanation has been written already in the three words that were many enough, and plain enough, for my confession. I loved her.”

It is inevitable that the issue of class and familial expectation be introduced to break up this natural process. And in the case of Walter Hartright, the news is delivered by Laura’ step-sister, Marion. “Crush it,” she says.

“As your friend,' she proceeded, `I am going to tell you, at once, in my own plain, blunt, downright language, that I have discovered your secret -- without help or hint, mind, from any one else. Mr Hartright, you have thoughtlessly allowed yourself to form an attachment -- a serious and devoted attachment, I am afraid -- to my sister Laura. I don't put you to the pain of confessing it in so many words, because I see and know that you are too honest to deny it. I don't even blame you -- I pity you for opening your heart to a hopeless affection. You have not attempted to take any underhand advantage -- you have not spoken to my sister in secret. You are guilty of weakness and want of attention to your own best interests, but of nothing worse. If you had acted, in any single respect, less delicately and less modestly, I should have told you to leave the house, without an instant's notice, or an instant's consultation of anybody. As it is, I blame the misfortune of your years and your position -- I don't blame you. Shake hands -- I have given you pain; I am going to give you more, but there is no help for it -- shake hands with your friend, Marian Halcombe, first.'

The sudden kindness -- the warm, high-minded, fearless sympathy which met me on such mercy equal terms, which appealed with such delicate and generous abruptness straight to my heart, my honour, and my courage, overcame me in an instant. I tried to look at her when she took my hand, but my eyes were dim. I tried to thank her, but my voice failed me.

`Listen to me,' she said, considerately avoiding all notice of my loss of self-control. `Listen to me, and let us get it over at once. It is a real true relief to me that I am not obliged, in what I have now to say, to enter into the question -- the hard and cruel question as I think it -- of social inequalities. Circumstances which will try you to the quick, spare me the ungracious necessity of paining a man who has lived in friendly intimacy under the same roof with myself by any humiliating reference to matters of rank and station. You must leave Limmeridge House, Mr Hartright, before more harm is done. It is my duty to say that to you; and it would be equally my duty to say it, under precisely the same serious necessity,

. . . if you were the representative of the oldest and wealthiest family in England. You must leave us, not because you are a teacher of drawing --'

She waited a moment, turned her face full on me, and reaching across the table, laid her hand firmly on my arm.

`Not because you are a teacher of drawing,' she repeated, `but because Laura Fairlie is engaged to be married.'

The last word went like a bullet to my heart. My arm lost all sensation of the hand that grasped it. I never moved and never spoke. The sharp autumn breeze that scattered the dead leaves at our feet came as cold to me, on a sudden, as if my own mad hopes were dead leaves too, whirled away by the wind like the rest. Hopes! Betrothed, or not betrothed, she was equally far from me. Would other men have remembered that in my place? Not if they had loved her as I did.

The pang passed, and nothing but the dull numbing pain of it remained. I felt Miss Halcombe's hand again, tightening its hold on my arm -- I raised my head and looked at her. Her large black eyes were rooted on me, watching the white change on my face, which I felt, and which she saw.

`Crush it!' she said. `Here, where you first saw her, crush it! Don't shrink under it like a woman. Tear it out; trample it under foot like a man!'

The suppressed vehemence with which she spoke, the strength which her will -- concentrated in the look she fixed on me, and in the hold on my arm that she had not yet relinquished -- communicated to mine, steadied me. We both waited for a minute in silence. At the end of that time I had justified her generous faith in my manhood -- I had, outwardly at least, recovered my self-control.

`Are you yourself again?'

`Enough myself, Miss Halcombe, to ask your pardon and hers. Enough to be guided by your advice, and to prove my gratitude in that way, if I can prove it in no other.'

`You have proved it already,' she answered, `by those words. Mr Hartright, concealment is at an end between us. I cannot affect to hide from you what my sister has unconsciously shown to me. You must leave us for her sake, as well as for your own. Your presence here, your necessary intimacy with us, harmless as it has been, God knows, in all other respects, has unsteadied her and made her wretched. I, who love her better than my own life -- I, who have learnt to believe in that pure, noble, innocent nature as I believe in my religion -- know but too well the secret misery of self-reproach that she has been suffering since the first shadow of a feeling disloyal to her marriage engagement entered her heart in spite of her. I don't say -- it would be useless to attempt to say it after what has happened -- that her engagement has ever had a strong hold on her affections. It is an engagement of honour, not of love; her father sanctioned it on his deathbed, two years since; she herself neither welcomed it nor shrank from it -- she was content to make it. Till you came here she was in the position of hundreds of other women, who marry men without being greatly attracted to them or greatly repelled by them, and who learn to love them (when they don't learn to hate!) after marriage, instead of before. I hope more earnestly than words can say -- and you should have the self-sacrificing courage to hope too -- that the new thoughts and feelings which have disturbed the old calmness and the old content have not taken root too deeply to be ever removed. Your absence (if I had less belief in your honour, and your courage, and your sense, I should not trust to them as I am trusting now) -- your absence will help my efforts, and time will help us all three. It is something to know that my first confidence in you was not all misplaced. It is something to know that you will not be less honest, less manly, less considerate towards the pupil whose relation to yourself you have had the misfortune to forget, than towards the stranger and the outcast whose appeal to you was not made in vain.”

Alas, Mr. Hatright. What were you THINKING?

“. . . Left by myself, my mind reverted, with a sense of forlorn wretchedness which it is not in any words that I can find to describe, to my approaching return to the solitude and the despair of my lonely London home.”

And thus Walter and Laura take their leave of one another to free her to marry the charming but, as we will soon discover, conniving and evil, Sir Perceval Glyde and his side-kick, the nefarious Count Fosco.

`Oh!' she said innocently, `how could I let you go, after we have passed so many happy days together!'

`Those days may never return, Miss Fairlie -- my way of life and yours are very far apart. But if a time should come, when the devotion of my whole heart and soul and strength will give you a moment's happiness, or spare you a moment's sorrow, will you try to remember the poor drawing-master who has taught you? Miss Halcombe has promised to trust me -- will you promise too?'

The farewell sadness in the kind blue eyes shone dimly through her gathering tears.

`I promise it,' she said in broken tones. `Oh, don't look at me like that! I promise it with all my heart.'

I ventured a little nearer to her, and held out my hand.

`You have many friends who love you, Miss Fairlie. Your happy future is the dear object of many hopes. May I say, at parting, that it is the dear object of my hopes too?'

The tears flowed fast down her cheeks- She rested one trembling hand on the table to steady herself while she gave me the other. I took it in mine -- I held it fast. My head drooped over it, my tears fell on it, my lips pressed it -- not in love; oh, not in love, at that last moment, but in the agony and the self- abandonment of despair.

`For God's sake, leave me!' she said faintly.

The confession of her heart's secret burst from her in those pleading words. I had no right to hear them, no right to answer them -- they were the words that banished me, in the name of her sacred weakness, from the room. It was all over. I dropped her hand, I said no more. The blinding tears shut her out from my eyes, and I dashed them away to look at her for the last time. One look as she sank into a chair, as her arms fell on the table, as her fair head dropped on them wearily. One farewell look, and the door had closed upon her -- the great gulf of separation had opened between us -- the image of Laura Fairlie was a memory of the past already.”

From here on in, Collins simply heaps a series of tragedies worthy of Job on these people for their betrayal of young love. Romeo and Juliette meets Miami Vice. He does manage to pull it out of the fire in the end and, the various rodents who wreck havoc on Walter and Laura’s love of each other for their love of money all get their comeuppance.

I can certainly see why people would stop naming their children “Perceval” after this book came out.

Question for Comment: Why do you think people like watching crime and justice stories on TV so much?

05/20/2011

In Plato’s Republic, the “original philosopher” argues that society should be divided into classes of rulers, auxiliaries, and merchants/farmers. To maintain order, the ruler-elites (guardians) would have to tell everyone else a “noble lie” – a story that essentially conveys to everyone the notion that each person is in the category that God wants them in. That everyone comes into the world with the traits of gold, silver, or bronze and that these traits are what determines the place in society that you play. The rulers would explain to people that your position was determined by your blood and that all decisions of occupation and marriage had to conform to the blood you carried. In short, social harmony required pervasive dishonesty and the end would justify that mean.

In M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, we are given a tale worthy of Plato, Edgar Allen Poe (The Masque of the Red Death), and the Brothers Grimm. A small village keeps its children safe and cozy in a cocoon of lies, leaving the viewer to decide if those means are justified by those ends. Children are put in fear of “Those we don’t speak of”; indoctrinated in a fear of “the bad color”; warned of the dangers of crossing “the forbidden line” and forbidden to see within “the forbidden shed.” Within the context of this invisible “dog-fence” of fears, they live Little House on the Prairie lives of bucolic bliss far from the world that their parents have fled and wish them to never know about.

Matthew Arnold in his poem Sea of Faith, laments the retreat of the sacred in the modern world, the receding tide of belief that once held us, comforted us, and infolded us in the arms of a protective divinity who let us sit on His lap. For Arnold, the only thing that we can do as humans in an era of diminishing credibility for such faith systems is cling to one another, The Sea of Faith, he writes,

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Carl Sagan captured the essence of this advice in his story, Contact where a skeptical scientist is brought to another world by an unexplainable traveling device. There she meets another being who comes to her in the form of her father. “You're an interesting species,” he says to her.

“An interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.”

It is as if to say that WE are the only comforting story left to us. Is this good news or bad? You find this same sentiment being expressed in Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat, a story of men rowing in a lifeboat, contemplating the stony absence of a caring universe and eventually coming to rely simply on themselves and each other.

"If I am going to be drowned--if I am going to be drowned--if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods, who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?"

During this dismal night, it may be remarked that a man would conclude that it was really the intention of the seven mad gods to drown him, despite the abominable injustice of it. For it was certainly an abominable injustice to drown a man who had worked so hard, so hard. The man felt it would be a crime most unnatural. Other people had drowned at sea since galleys swarmed with painted sails, but still --

When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples. Any visible expression of nature would surely be pelleted with his jeers.

Then, if there be no tangible thing to hoot he feels, perhaps, the desire to confront a personification and indulge in pleas, bowed to one knee, and with hands supplicant, saying: "Yes, but I love myself."

A high cold star on a winter`s night is the word he feels that she says to him. Thereafter he knows the pathos of his situation.

The men in the dingey had not discussed these matters, but each had, no doubt, reflected upon them in silence and according to his mind.”

His argument is that reality is a high cold star on a winter night. Faith would have us to believe otherwise. I suppose everything starts with asking yourself the question, “What would make me happier? To know I was on my own? Or to know I am not? One must then admit to themselves that with respect to a question this big, reality isn’t going to go away just because you don’t want it to be there. You either are alone or you are not. But at some point in time in everyone’s life, they may have to face the fact that “the “bad color” may not be bad; “the forbidden line” may be a human construct and “those we don’t speak of” may not exist. At some point in time. We may have to embark on Descartes’ journey ourselves.

05/11/2011

“Where he is, is immaterial” - Craig Ewart's wife soon after his departure.

“He is not gone as long as someone remembers his name,” Craig Ewarts (1947-2006)voiceover intones in the final moment of the documentary The Suicide Tourist. Moments earlier, we watched him pass away as a result of his decision to drink a fatal dose of medications and to turn off his breathing apparatus.

In one of Frontline’s most controversial documentaries to day, they allow Craig Ewarts and his wife and children to tell the story of Craig’s decision to end his life. Diagnosed with ALS and given only a short time to live, the subject of the documentary takes us through the decision making process – and the process itself – so that viewers can make up their own minds.

One senses as they watch the looming shadow of the crisis that the aging of the babyboomers in the United States presents. You can watch the hour long journey HERE at Frontline. Or you can read The Philosopher’s Breif, a document presented to the United States Supreme Court in favor of granting American citizens the right to doctor assisted suicide.

It is clear from the brief that the arguments that have in the past been used to defend a woman’s right to chose to terminate a pregnancy are being further applied philosophically in the case of a person’s right to end their lives. Note the number of times that the authors of this moral and legal argument rely on the wording of the Casey decision (A case involving a State’s right to prohibit abortion).

“Our Constitution forbids government to impose such convictions on its citizens. Petitioners [i.e., the state authorities of Washington and New York] and the amici who support them offer two contradictory arguments. Some deny that the patient-plaintiffs have any constitutionally protected liberty interest in hastening their own deaths. But that liberty interest flows directly from this Court’s previous decisions. It flows from the right of people to make their own decisions about matters “involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy.” Planned Parenthoodv. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 851 (1992).

. . . Certain decisions are momentous in their impact on the character of a person’s life—decisions about religious faith, political and moral allegiance, marriage, procreation, and death, for example. Such deeply personal decisions pose controversial questions about how and why human life has value. In a free society, individuals must be allowed to make those decisions for themselves, out of their own faith, conscience, and convictions. This Court has insisted, in a variety of contexts and circumstances, that this great freedom is among those protected by the Due Process Clause as essential to a community of “ordered liberty.” Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U.S. 319, 325 (1937). In its recent decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 851 (1992), the Court offered a paradigmatic statement of that principle: > matters [] involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to a person’s dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. That declaration reflects an idea underlying many of our basic constitutional protections”

. . . In Casey, this Court, in holding that a state cannot constitutionally proscribe abortion in all cases, reiterated that the Constitution protects a sphere of autonomy in which individuals must be permitted to make certain decisions for themselves. The Court began its analysis by pointing out that “[a]t the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” 505 U.S. at 851. Choices flowing out of these conceptions, on matters “involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.”

. . . , the Court explained at length that the right flows from the constitutional protection accorded all individuals to “define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Casey, 505 U.S. at 851. The analysis in Casey compels the conclusion that the patient-plaintiffs have a liberty interest in this case that a state cannot burden with a blanket prohibition. Like a woman’s decision whether to have an abortion, a decision to die involves one’s very “destiny” and inevitably will be “shaped to a large extent on [one’s] own conception of [one’s] spiritual imperatives and [one’s] place in society.” Id. at 852. Just as a blanket prohibition on abortion would involve the improper imposition of one conception of the meaning and value of human existence on all individuals, so too would a blanket prohibition on assisted suicide. The liberty interest asserted here cannot be rejected without undermining the rationale of Casey. Indeed, the lower court opinions in the Washington case expressly recognized the parallel between the liberty interest in Casey and the interest asserted here.

. . . “[T]he reasoning in Casey [is] highly instructive and almost prescriptive…”. This Court should do the same.

. . . It may be legitimate for a state to deny an opportunity for assisted suicide when it acts in what it reasonably judges to be the best interests of the potential suicide, and when its judgment on that issue does not rest on contested judgments about “matters involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy.” Casey, 505 U.S. at 851.”

I would simply ask however, if the State grants the right of people to acquire help in dying, will it have the will and wherewithal to keep that right from being exploited? Misused? Mistakenly applied? I suspect that it might not.

Welcome to a debate in one of my future ethics classes.

Question for Comment: Do you wish to retain the right to decide the terms of your death should you ever have cause to end your journey earlier than nature or nature’s God may have had you live?

It seems like a plot line that always works. Take one man or one woman. Put them in a place where they have to choose between two partners. One LOOKS like a good choice but isn't. The other LOOKS like a bad choice but is. Stir them up and watch what happens. Grin.

This can be slightly modified so that both candidates look like good choices or look like bad choices but for different reasons.

In the course of the movie the one who IS the better candidate has to do something to offend the prospective partner who then rejects them for the less qualified partner who has not made a mistake yet. In the American versions, the offending candidate figures out a way to apologize in time.

Sometimes, the more qualified but less qualified LOOKING candidate does not recognize that the relationship is a possibility while the less qualified but more qualified LOOKING candidate knows it is if he or she can keep some secret a secret.

05/07/2011

The premise of Giving Voice Values is that many of us have spent a good deal more time determining what is right and wrong than we have to the process of implementing our conclusions in real time situations. GVV is a book dedicated to thinking about how people can go about bringing that internal voice to bear on actual life decisions.

The author asks you to reflect on the times in your life when you have seen a need to speak out about an ethical issue and either did or did not. They ask you to reflect on the internal and external factors that made it possible, difficult, or impossible for you to do so. The book asks you to consider the possibility that you have more choices than you think you have if you only know how to execute.

For instance, one of the first things that a person can do to bring about the implementation of their values is to simply articulate them. There is something about saying something out loud that makes it real – that makes it easier to take the next step. Gentile suggests that a person who wants to be more ethical must also invest a little time in thinking about, imagining, scripting and planning for that to happen. Just as the determination of right and wrong demands intelligent thought, so also does the actualization of it. We need to construct the story that will make an ethical decision obvious. We need to think about who needs to hear that story and how it can be best told. Few things will make a decision more possible or impossible for others to accept than the framing of the question at hand.

“The search for the unassailable argument can be the enemy of success” Gentile writes in an encouragement not to wait until there are no countervailing arguments before we articulate what may be an obvious ethical position. Frequently, ethical dilemmas are caused by the opposition of character traits that we value (truth v. loyalty; individual v. community; short term v. long term; justice v. mercy etc.) Thus the way the dilemma is framed is all-important. Is the dilemma primarily a matter of loyalty or truth? What if it is both? Another essential element of being a more consistent implementer of ethical values is to have a clearer sense of our own self story. Gentile argues that we need to know who we are ethically so that we can better align ourselves in the decisions that we make. (She advocates accumulating a fund she calls “go-to-hell-money” that can provide us with a little security if we ever have to decide between our values and our jobs.) “Are you an idealist, a pragmatist, or an opportunist?” She asks? Do you understand what the purpose of your life is? Can you explain who you are so that it makes sense to you why you will or will not be able to do something?

All in all a good book if you are interested in bringing a more perfect pitch to your moral voice and greater harmony between what you think and what you do in life.

Question for Comment: What makes it difficult for you to maintain a consistent relationship between your values and your conduct in life?

05/04/2011

"She might have been taken - had been taken - to the top of the Alps and the bottom of Herculaneum, without disarranging a fold in her dress, or displacing a pin...Mrs General had no opinions. Her way of forming a mind was to prevent it from forming opinions...Mrs General was not to be told of anything shocking. Accidents, miseries and offences, were never to be mentioned before her..." (Dickens, 1857(1998 edition):435)

Charles Dickens’ novel, Little Dorrit, provides a literal taxonomy of female archetypes from the Victorian Era. The governess, Mrs. General is the virtual pathway for Victorian socialization of proper women, taking on the job of taking Amy Dorrit and her sister Fanny through Victorian women bootcamp. Her goal seems to be to reduce these young women to the status of porcelain figurines who can catch the eye of a rich banker shopping for porcelain figurines. Fanny Dorrit has her own strategies, parlaying her charm and good looks to great effect as she first attracts and then conquers the unwitting Edward Sparkler from the jaws of his similarly scheming mother.

In a way, Dickens rejects the notion that young women should be raised to pursue their happiness at finishing school and in front of a mirror or in the chorus line of a downtown London dancehall. But he does replace it with another notion that some have called “the angel in the home.” For Dickens, Amy Dorrit (little Dorrit) is the archetype of the ideal. She is not like Mrs. Clennam who has taken on all the attributes of a patriarch and CEO of “Clennam and company” – a woman who seems to have driven her husband to China with her manly demeanor. She is not like the hardened and bitter Miss Wade who seems to almost hate men because of her unrequited love for one of them. She is not like the hopelessly coquettish Flora Finching who hasn’t the brains, it seems, to give up on a strategy of seduction that has not and will never work for her.

Amy Dorrit finds her happiness in the end because she learns to inhabit the role of a servant. More than any other character, she empties herself of herself, and lets the needs of the people in her life prevail over her own. She literally plays the part of Christ in the family, offering herself – her work – her ego – her life up for the needs of others. One can almost hear the whisper of her saintly soul in the face of her brother’s treatment of her “Father forgive him. He knows not what he does.” The following scene reminds us of the last supper where Jesus breaks the bread and offers the wine that he says is his body and blood.

"She filled his glass, put all the little matters on the table ready to his hand, and then sat beside him while he ate his supper. Evidently in observance of their nightly custom, she put some bread before herself, and touched his glass with her lips"

The moral of Little Dorrit is in a sense Biblical. Through the travels and travails of Amy Dorrit, we see that the road to exultation is servanthood. Amy embodies the teachings of Paul in Philippians where he tells the church at Philippi that they must follow Christ through the cross if they are to follow him to glory. “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit,” Paul tells the Philippians,

“Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.

In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!

Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

And so it is that Amy Dorrit revokes her fortune at the end and thereby gaining the opportunity to serve Arthur Clennam in debtors prison as she had once served her father William Dorrit. Like the Christ-figure, she surrenders heaven for service. And, as a consequence, the noble Arthur Clennam – himself a servant – is rewarded by the return of his partner from Russia and the restoration of his fortune. Perhaps it is an overstatement but in a sense, in Dickens’ Little Dorrit, Amy Dorrit is Jesus. No matter what hardship, deprivation, humiliation, rejection, or pressure she is subjected to, she always finds a way to a self-sacrifice of some kind, often giving herself to the needs of those who misuse and falsely malign her (her brother, her father, her sister, Mrs. Clennam, her rival for Arthur’s affections, Pet Meagles, and so on.) What they do to her or how they harm her seems to be immaterial to her conviction that she must live to serve.

I am reminded of an article From the Caledonia Record (VT news paper) dated October 10, 1837, that discusses The Wedded Life,

"It may perhaps startle you, Ella, by saying that the first years of a young woman’s wedded life is generally the most unhappy and trying one she experiences…..although it is in the power and nature of a women to manifest her devotedness and tenderness by a thousand little attentions, she must not repine if she receive not the like…… Every wish, every prejudice, must meet with attention, and the first thought of woman should be the pleasing and providing for her husband……She must act for him in preference to herself, and she will be amply rewarded by witnessing his delight in her home…..The greatest misery a woman can experience is the changed heart and alienated affections of her husband, but even in that painful case she must not relax in the performance of her duties…..A kind look, an affectionate expression half uttered must bring his wife to his side, and she must with smiles of tenderness, encourage the returning affection, carefully avoiding all reference to her sufferings, or the cause of her pain….This will not be difficult for virtuous women to perform……Her devotedness will be her rock."

This captures the essence of Amy Dorrit’s approach to people in her life (not just the men) and it is highlighted in contrast to the other women in the story who do not embody this ideal – who use their powers as women to seduce men, to entrap men, harness men up to their desire for luxuries or for material security, or to harm them, or even murder them.

In the end, Amy’s reward is to obtain the love of two men who think and act with a similar commitment to serving their fellow men. For not only is Arthur Clennam himself a servant of others, a man willing to serve those he loves even when to do so is contrary to his own interests, but so too is the luckless John Chivery who must on several occasions, play the role of Amy’s devoted benefactor never to be rewarded in any way. In reality, John Chivery is the novel’s unsung hero for he truly never gets his heart’s desire despite his sacrifices for the desires of others. I find a great affection for John Chivery and dedicate the rest of the post to his memory.

Little Dorrit's lover, however, was not a Collegian. He was the sentimental son of a turnkey. . . . Years agone, when the object of his affections was wont to sit in her little arm-chair by the high Lodge-fender, Young John (family name, Chivery), a year older than herself, had eyed her with admiring wonder. When he had played with her in the yard, his favourite game had been to counterfeit locking her up in corners, and to counterfeit letting her out for real kisses. When he grew tall enough to peep through the keyhole of the great lock of the main door, he had divers times set down his father's dinner, or supper, to get on as it might on the outer side thereof, while he stood taking cold in one eye by dint of peeping at her through that airy perspective.

If Young John had ever slackened in his truth in the less penetrable days of his boyhood, when youth is prone to wear its boots unlaced and is happily unconscious of digestive organs, he had soon strung it up again and screwed it tight. At nineteen, his hand had inscribed in chalk on that part of the wall which fronted her lodgings, on the occasion of her birthday, 'Welcome sweet nursling of the Fairies!' At twenty-three, the same hand falteringly presented cigars on Sundays to the Father of the Marshalsea, and Father of the queen of his soul.

Young John was small of stature, with rather weak legs and very weak light hair. One of his eyes (perhaps the eye that used to peep through the keyhole) was also weak, and looked larger than the other, as if it couldn't collect itself. Young John was gentle likewise. But he was great of soul. Poetical, expansive, faithful.

Though too humble before the ruler of his heart to be sanguine, Young John had considered the object of his attachment in all its lights and shades. Following it out to blissful results, he had descried, without self-commendation, a fitness in it. Say things prospered, and they were united. She, the child of the Marshalsea; he, the lock-keeper. There was a fitness in that. Say he became a resident turnkey. She would officially succeed to the chamber she had rented so long. There was a beautiful propriety in that. It looked over the wall, if you stood on tip-toe; and, with a trellis-work of scarlet beans and a canary or so, would become a very Arbour. There was a charming idea in that. Then, being all in all to one another, there was even an appropriate grace in the lock. With the world shut out (except that part of it which would be shut in); with its troubles and disturbances only known to them by hearsay, as they would be described by the pilgrims tarrying with them on their way to the Insolvent Shrine; with the Arbour above, and the Lodge below; they would glide down the stream of time, in pastoral domestic happiness.

Young John drew tears from his eyes by finishing the picture with a tombstone in the adjoining churchyard, close against the prison wall, bearing the following touching inscription: 'Sacred to the Memory Of JOHN CHIVERY, Sixty years Turnkey, and fifty years Head Turnkey, Of the neighbouring Marshalsea, Who departed this life, universally respected, on the thirty-first of December, One thousand eight hundred and eighty-six, Aged eighty-three years. Also of his truly beloved and truly loving wife, AMY, whose maiden name was DORRIT, Who survived his loss not quite forty-eight hours, And who breathed her last in the Marshalsea aforesaid. There she was born, There she lived, Thereshe died.'

Poor John Chivery screws his courage to the sticking post and proposes in chapter 18. His suit is unsuccessful. Amy kindly bids him to speak no more of his dreams.

It was an affecting illustration of the fallacy of human projects, to behold her lover, with the great hat pulled over his eyes, the velvet collar turned up as if it rained, the plum-coloured coat buttoned to conceal the silken waistcoat of golden sprigs, and the little direction-post pointing inexorably home, creeping along by the worst back-streets, and composing, as he went, the following new inscription for a tombstone in St George's Churchyard:

'Here lie the mortal remains Of JOHN CHIVERY, Never anything worth mentioning, Who died about the end of the year one thousand eight hundred and twenty-six, Of a broken heart, Requesting with his last breath that the word AMY might be inscribed over his ashes, which was accordingly directed to be done, By his afflicted Parents.'

Question for Comment: Do you think that people are naturally compelled to serve people they see serving?

05/02/2011

In her book, The Twenty-Four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives dream and sleep researcher, Rosalind D. Cartwright argues that dreams help us to deconstruct, reconstruct, organize, file, sort, and restructure the bedrock of our personality as life forces us to remake ourselves to meet its challenges. Our brain's "night shift involves a different set of chores than those of daytime hours," she says. Cartwright refers to it as "modifying the software program of the self" on the basis of new information and emotional response.

In a nut shell, active dreaming can make modifications to core beliefs and rigid emotional bedrock that allow problems to be resolved in wake-life more easily. Dreams are the minds gentle earth moving equipment, put to use in clearing away rubble, and sometimes, when necessary, creating it so that essential change can come. Cartwright refers to "false schemas" - essentially inaccurate stories that we use to make our life decisions that may be resistent to wake-time reasoning but pliable to sleep-time story-telling. How these "false schemas" can be modified by dreaming is the subject of much of the book. One of the most important questions she asks in my opinion is "Is dream interpretation necesary in order for change in a dysfunctional schema to take place?"

Perhaps one should ask, does dream interpretation undo the work that unconscious dreaming does, bending it to the service of the old consciously held schema and depriving it of its power. Is there a good reason why our minds conceal so much of what we dream from our conscious awareness? Different people have different "thicknesses of the boundaries of the mind" as Ernest Hartmann puts it. They are either very aware of or unaware of what is going on in that busy place we call the subconscious.